


The Onlies

by TheRedGlass



Category: Wolverine (Movies), Wolverine and the X-Men - All Media Types, X-Men (Movieverse)
Genre: Found Family, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Kylie Anderson, Oneshot, Whump, Wolverine whump, does it count as au canon divergence if it's your own oc, logan as a mentor, minor on both counts, this was supposed to be a short prompt fill and look where that got me
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-05
Updated: 2020-06-05
Packaged: 2021-03-04 07:14:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,536
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24549742
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheRedGlass/pseuds/TheRedGlass
Summary: When Logan is sent to investigate a facility that had been researching anti-mutant bioweapons, he finds an empty building but a strange group of children - strange, even for mutants. One girl's powers in particular could cause a real problem, and Logan may have met his match.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 4





	The Onlies

**Author's Note:**

> Hi, yes I know it's been five million years and I desperately need to upload another chapter of the co-authored Avengers Pirate!AU fic but my brain has not been in a great place in a hot minute, work has been extremely busy, and my creativity has been on zero. We're living in some wild times right now. Wash your hands, wear a mask, and if you're protesting please be safe.  
> This was a prompt fill for a dialogue based whump prompt list on tumblr, as requested by a friend. It features my X-Men OC Kylie, for whom I have an entire Encyclopedia Britannica's worth of story since she was one of my main RP characters for years. One of these days I'm going to edit my RP content and turn it into fic, but for now just know this is sort of an AU where Kylie and Logan's first meeting takes place at this facility instead of following a weird time incident at an air and space museum in Florida.

The last thing Logan was expecting on a simple reconnaissance mission was to run into resistance in the form of a band of teenage mutants.

Charles had gotten wind of a facility working on a way to increase mutant capabilities. And naturally, they were attempting to weaponize it. But before he could launch an investigation, the place went dark. No more information in or out, no power to the building, and all the human activity suddenly ceased. They were a good distance from the place – a whole state over – but even so, a facility of that size didn't just shut down overnight. There was nothing in the news to indicate that their objective had been met and they were moving to strike, but it seemed highly suspicious for the place to just become abandoned. So Logan had been tasked with having a quick, surreptitious look around before they committed to sending in a whole team.

The facility was tucked in a wooded valley, ten miles outside of the nearest town. Power for the place came from five enormous generators – although they were silent as Logan made his approach. He barely made it within fifty yards of the place when, without warning, a group of teenagers swarmed out of seemingly nowhere. He realized they were mutants when a redheaded girl at the front of the pack was suddenly raining fireballs down on him.

“Hey!” he shouted, retreating just a bit. “I'm here to help! We heard this place was trying to hurt mutants-”

“Liar!” screamed a boy to the side, and he stretched out his arms and suddenly rocks were shooting up from the ground, fracturing into tiny sharp pieces and flying at Logan's face.

And then all hell broke loose as each of the fifteen or more kids each unleashed their individual powers.

It was a fight like nothing he'd been in before. It seemed like each member of the pack was anticipating his next move, and he found himself getting exhausted frighteningly quickly – as though he'd been fighting for hours, not minutes.

The only thing not moving was a girl in the very back of the pack; a petite girl with dark messy hair resting on her shoulders and a thousand yard stare in her empty eyes. Freckles lit up the pale face that seemed to emote not at all, nor even react when either Logan or one of the teenagers landed a blow.

Every so often the scene in front of him seemed to slide or tilt or blink, like a television on the fritz, and some moments he thought he saw a blue glow. But he blamed it on his exhaustion.

Eventually, he was forced to retreat. He was making no headway and becoming fatigued and, if he was completely honest with himself, he was actually a little bit scared. These kids...even for mutants, there was something off about them. He couldn't get anywhere near the facility without getting through them, and he would need a lot more information for that. So he backed away, not sure what to expect. Thankfully, the kids let him go, watching with narrowed eyes as he backed away, hands slightly raised.

“I don't know what to tell you, Chuck,” he said into the communication receiver onboard the jet he'd taken from the school and landed hidden in a valley away from the facility. Every word out of his mouth was tinged with weariness. “I don't even know if I can talk to them. Might need some reinforcements on this one.”

On the other end of the line, the professor made a soft, thoughtful sound as he considered the information. “Whatever they've been through, it sounds traumatic. I think we have to handle this carefully, prevent them from becoming more frightened.” There was a pause, and the sound of him accessing a computer system. “We've managed to tap into a scanning system and we're showing that all the lifesigns are now sequestered inside of the facility.” He hesitated. “Would you be up to taking another look? If they come after you again, retreat and we'll send backup, but they haven't moved in a few hours and we don't have much evidence of any kind of enhanced security system.”

Logan sighed. “Look, you didn't see these kids-”

“Please, Logan? I think...I think something more may be going on here, perhaps even worse than we initially feared...”

The note of real fear in the professor's voice made a counter argument die in Logan's throat. He sighed, and thought of the faces of the students Charles Xavier had taken in, some of whom he had helped teach. “Yeah, yeah all right. I'll try.”

He waited until darkness fell before stealthily crawling forth from the jet, relying on his heightened senses to find his way through the forest and back to the facility. He took his time, listening hard for the return of the children, but the woods were eerily still and this time he managed to make it to the cement walls of the facility and slip inside an unsecured door. He tried not to think of what that might mean.

The cavernous hallways were loud with their silence, the tiniest creaks and echoes assaulting his enhanced senses. He moved as quickly as he dared, listening hard for any sign of the children realizing their location had been infiltrated. But there was nothing, and that concerned him more. There was clear evidence of the place having been abandoned quickly, but no ready answer as to why. 

He smelled the group before he heard or saw them. Or, more accurately, the scent of blood reached him before anything else. On high alert, he slipped through a doorway and found himself on a walkway of sorts above a mostly empty storeroom where the kids stood gathered in a circle, the dead-eyed dark haired girl at the center. He frowned, and crouched to observe. 

A tall redheaded boy approached and circled around her. “Again,” he said aggressively. He held up what looked like an old pocketwatch and the girl flinched like she'd been struck. But she raised a shaking hand and suddenly there was a bright blue light splitting the air in front of her, thirty feet high. It slowly widened, and then Logan could swear that he saw a couple of people in 1920s clothing step through it and into the room. But before he could process, the boy shoved the girl and she stumbled back and the whole apparition disappeared. “Come on, we need more than that.” He looked around at the group. “Doesn't anyone have anything older than this stupid watch?”

A blonde girl with dark eyeliner stepped forward. “Here, I chipped this off a Civil War tombstone. Might work?”

The dark haired girl in the center paled at that, but she stood still.

The redheaded boy grinned. “That should do the trick.” Without warning, he held it up to the girl's face and this time she cried out and held up her hands and a portal twice as large burst into the air, the blue light blinding. Soldiers in Civil War garb appeared, along with a cannon and a tent.

As Logan squinted through the light, he watched the boy stab the girl with a needle and suddenly her blood was flowing into a tube and into a bag. After about a minute, he yanked the needle out and the girl swayed and the light disappeared. As she landed on one knee, the boy took the collected blood over to an area set up off to the side. He tipped blood into some vials and started a centrifuge.

“Three of us will try the new dose in an hour,” he announced. “After that-”

“Someone's here,” another boy suddenly interrupted, and another girl looked around wildly and sent out some kind of wave that quivered through the air and when it hit Logan a harsh pain shot through his head and he cried out, grabbing his head feeling warm liquid starting to leak from his ears. He pulled his hand away to see red. He scrambled to his feet.

“Get rid of him!” bellowed the boy who seemed to be in charge. 

He scrambled for the exit, fully expecting the full wrath of the group to be hot on his heels. But when he was partway down the hallway to the exit, he chanced a glance behind him, and it was only the dark haired girl rushing after him. He hesitated, given the display he had just witnessed. Maybe she wasn't part of the group, maybe she was just a prisoner-

The blue light that she shot at his head told him otherwise.

He turned and ran again. No sense fighting a child. Time to tell Charles to send in the reinforcements.

But once outside, the blue light came searing from behind him and collided heavily with his body, sending him tumbling to the ground with all the air punching out of his lungs. He dragged himself up as soon as he could and his hand went to his shoulder, feeling the split skin there. He stood, confident that the wound would close itself in short order, and faced the oncoming girl. He didn't want to fight her, but maybe he could get some more information from her if he could only incapacitate her for a few minutes or somehow convince her that he wasn't her enemy.

She came slouching up the hill, not looking at him as she raised a hand and another bolt of blue light split the forest air in front of him. He tried to speak, but suddenly he felt he was in two places at once, two moments at once – he could see the girl there in front of him, but he could also see the boy shoving her inside that room. He couldn't understand it and it felt like his brain was splitting in two, and as his consciousness started to slide away, he gripped his shoulder and was startled to discover that the wound there still bled heavily. It hadn't been a serious injury, it should have begun to close in moments-

But then the world twisted and swirled and went dark and he stopped thinking at all.

~

He was surprised to wake up. He blinked slowly, staring at the treetops. He was laid out on his back on the forest floor, and there was the glow and scent of a campfire nearby. He started to turn his head, but was stopped by a small hand on his forehead.

“Don't try to move yet,” a girl's voice said softly. “Your body's still out of phase...”

He closed his eyes to rest them for a moment, then opened them again when he felt like he could focus. The dark haired girl was knelt over him, wiping at his injuries with a warm wet cloth.

“So,” he managed to croak. “Time powers?”

She hesitated, the hand with the cloth frozen and hovering over what seemed to be a cut and a bruise high on his forehead.

“Come on, you've seen my mutations, think it's only fair I know yours.”

The cloth began to move again. After a few moments, she finally admitted, “Yeah.”

He hummed in satisfaction. “How about a name, you got one of those?”

She turned to rinse the fabric and wring it out. A few more moments ticked by. “Kylie,” she said, bringing the cloth back to his face.

“Logan,” he replied.

She moved the cloth to clean the gash on his shoulder and he hissed at the contact, surprised to find the injury still affecting him. 

“Sorry,” Kylie murmured. “I have to get all your organic matter back on the same temporal plane of existence, but it takes longer when I'm...drained.”

He spotted the deep bruise in the crook of her elbow, blood still drying there. “What do they want your blood for?”

“They're trying to figure out if there's a single, related, original mutation that all our different mutations stem from,” she said quietly, dabbing at the sluggishly closing wound on his shoulder. “Trying to increase our powers, make them stronger.”

“And those old objects? The watch, the tombstone-”

“Trigger my powers stronger than I can on my own. I'm not...great at controlling them yet.” 

“What's going on in there?” he asked, carefully, desperately hoping he could get the answers Charles needed without having to risk bringing a whole crew of highly trained mutants into what clearly was a very volatile situation.

Kylie hesitated, but the story came out in pieces. How an organization had kidnapped young mutants to experiment on them. How one day something had gone terribly wrong and several of the children had died. How the organization had panicked and tried to abandon the place and erase its existence – especially the remaining test subjects. How the children had fought back, destroyed them, and vowed to have their revenge, taking their kidnappers' technology and using it to try to enhance themselves. How they had recruited runaways to join their cause – like her. And how important her powers were to what they were attempting.

She looked tired when she finished the story, and she set aside the cloth. “You can sit up now, if you want.”

Logan very slowly and painfully managed to drag himself to a sitting position, feeling his head spin as he did so.

She saw the pained look on his face. “Sorry, I still have to sync your timelines up.” She sat back on her heels, closed her eyes, and raised a hand towards him. He flinched as her hand quivered and he thought about what she'd said about not being able to control her powers. But a weird quivery feeling gripped him for only a second before it passed and he could feel his body begin to heal like normal, though still a bit slow. 

Kylie swayed as she opened her eyes but managed not to topple over.

“Thank you,” he said sincerely. 

She nodded and turned away, gathering up the blood stained cloths and a little kettle that had been hung over the fire.

“You have a lot of supplies here,” he remarked, trying to keep his tone casual. “Going camping?”

“I've tried to leave a couple times,” she admitted in little more than a mumble, poking at the flames with a stick.

“They hurt you,” he said, frowning across the fire between them.“Why do you keep going back?”

She shrugged and flicked a piece of bark into the flames, avoiding his eyes. “They're the only family I've got.”

Logan considered that quietly for a long minute, thinking of the years he'd spent fighting because he didn't know anything else, of the toxic people he'd aligned himself with because he didn't think there was anything more that he could have or deserved. He understood what it was to have the world reject you, and to try to make your space in it however you could, no matter if the people around you truly wanted the best for you or not.

“You want another one?” he finally asked.

She looked at him with a thoughtful frown.

“I know this professor...”


End file.
